Outreach

The South Asia Institute provides a range of resources and activities to serve elementary and secondary schools and college teachers. As a National Resource Center, we organize a number of teacher training events annually, featuring faculty and advanced graduate students from Columbia and other area universities.

If you are an educator, and would like to receive email notification of upcoming teacher training activities, please send the following information to William Carrick at wac2112@columbia.edu: name, title, school affiliation, courses and grade levels of students taught. Non-teaching educators should include name, title, school affiliation, grade levels at your institution, and a brief description of your role within the institution. You may unsubscribe at any time by sending a request via email.

The South Asia Institute provides other outreach activities for business, media, and local community organizations. Most of the conferences and lectures, workshops, and other events listed on our Upcoming Events page are open to the public.

Fall 2012 Professional Development Course for Teachers

Muslim Societies:Local Histories and Local Practices
in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia

Co-sponsored by the Institute of African Studies and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University

"Muslim Societies" features six scholars who will examine the cultures and histories of Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Mali, Pakistan, and Senegal from anthropological, historical, and political perspectives; and the variety of the everyday lives and religious practices of Muslims today and across history. Talks will cover the revolutionary events in Egypt of the past year and the growth of Shi'a political power in the past 100 years; the importance of Sufism and local religious practices in West Africa, and the issue of "Arabisation," in African societies; defining religious communities and identities on the Indian subcontinent in the colonial period, and secularism and gender practices in contemporary Bangladesh.

Thursday, Oct 25: "Explaining the Uprising in Egypt"Mona El Ghobashy (Assistant Professor, Politics Department, Barnard College)
By the second day of the January 25th, 2011 Egyptian uprising, observers began forwarding explanations for why it happened. There are now several dozen such explanations, variously focusing on economic, political, or sociological factors. This talk surveys a handful of the most widely-invoked causes of the uprising, proposing an argument stressing its political roots.

Thursday, November 1: "An Introduction to Shi'ism and its Rise as a Global Political Force"Najam Haider (Assistant Professor, Departments of History and Religion, Barnard College)
The class will include an introduction to the history and theological beliefs of the 12-er Shias who constitute a vast majority of the current Shi'i world population. It will then turn to the evolution of Shi'ism over the last hundred years and its emergence as a global political force.

Thursday, November 15 "Sufi Orders in Senegal and their philosophies"A talk by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Professor, Department of French and Romance Philology; and Acting Director, Institute of African Studies)

Thursday, December 13:"Islamisation of Africa or Africanisation of Islam? A History of Islam in West Africa"
Mamadou Diouf (Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and History and Director, Institute of African Studies)

Readings will include articles selected by each speaker and distributed via email and at workshops. Some readings will be taken from the following books to be distributed to participants:

Islam in South Asia. Edited by Barbara D. Metcalf (Princeton, 2009)
The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest and Social Change in Egypt. Edited by Jeannie Sowers and Chris Toensing (Verso, 2012)
Muslim Societies in African History. David Robinson (Cambridge, 2004)

REGISTRATION: Participants must be K-12 teachers, two-year college instructors or students enrolled in education degree programs. Attendees may register for all six meetings or register for individual sessions. If you would like to register, or have questions, please contact William Carrick at wac2112@columbia.edu or at (212) 854-4565. To register, please include your name, school affiliation, level of students taught, and subjects taught. Students should include their school and degree program, anticipated graduation date, and a very brief statement of career goals.

There is no registration fee to attend the workshop. All books and materials will be provided to participants at no cost.

For additional information, please contact William Carrick at wac2112@columbia.edu or by phone at (212) 854-4565.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor in the Department of French and
Romance Philology, and the Acting Director of the Institute of African Studies. He received his academic training in France.
From the École Normale Supérieure, he holds an agrégation in Philosophy (1978) and he earned his Doctorat d'État in philosophy
at the Sorbonne (1988). His field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African
philosophy and literature. Diagne's teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy and Sufism in
the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, and twentieth century French philosophy. His most recent book, Bergson
postcolonial. L'élan vital dans la pensée de Léopold Sédar Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal, (2011) was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret
prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 2011. It was published in English as African Art as Philosophy:
Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (2012). Other recent publications in English include Islam and the Open Society:
Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (2011) and the edited volume The meanings of Timbuktu (with Shamil
Jeppee, 2008).

Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and
the Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.
Before joining the faculty at Columbia, he was the Charles D. Moody Jr. Collegiate Professor of History and African American
Studies at the University of Michigan; Head of the Research, Information, and Documentation Department of the Council for the
Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and faculty member at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal.
His research interests include urban, political, social and intellectual history in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Diouf's
publications include: the upcoming edited volume Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (2013); Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic
World: Rituals and Remembrances (with Ifeoma C.K. Nwankwo, 2010); New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration,
Wealth, and Power (with Mara A. Leichtman, 2009), La Construction de l'Etat au Sénégal (with M. C. Diop & D. Cruise O'Brien, 2002),
and Histoire du Sénégal: Le Modèle Islamo-Wolof et ses Périphéries (2001).

Mona El Ghobashy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Barnard College. She earned her PhD at Columbia University, and has taught at Columbia, Hunter and Brooklyn Colleges. In Fall
2006 her dissertation, titled "Taming Leviathan: Constitutional Contention in Contemporary Egypt," which examines institutional
change in authoritarian regimes, received the Malcolm H. Kerr Award from the Middle Eastern Studies Association for being the
best dissertation in the social sciences. Her interests include social movements and (de)democratization in the Middle East and
North Africa. She has worked as a consultant for the International Crisis Group, and was a reporter for the weekly Cairo Times
from 1999-2003.

Najam Haider is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at
Barnard College. Previously, he taught at Franklin & Marshall College, Georgetown University, New York University, and Princeton
University. He completed his PhD at Princeton, and an M.Phil. at Oxford. At Barnard he teaches courses focusing on the modern and
pre-modern Muslim world. His current research interests focus on identity formation in the pre-modern Muslim world, Shi'ism, and
the role of Islamic Law in the modern Muslim world. Professor Haider has been the recipient of a Center for the Study of Religion
dissertation grant and a Keasbey Fellowship to University of Oxford. He is the author of The Origins of the Shi'a: Identity,
Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa (2011) and co-edited the forthcoming Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic
Thought: Studies in Honor of Professor Hossein Modarressi (with Michael Cook, Asma Sayeed, and Intisar Rabb, 2011).

Teena Purohit joined the Department of Religion at Boston University
in Fall 2009. She received her Ph.D in Religion at Columbia University in 2007. She has taught at Columbia University and the
University of California, Irvine. Purohit's research and teaching interests focus on modern Islam South Asian religions, religion
and colonialism, and South Asian history. Her book first book, The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India is
forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2012.

Dina Siddiqi is Visiting Associate Professor in the Women and Gender
Studies Program at Hunter College, CUNY. Siddiqi is a cultural anthropologist with a interest in gender, human rights and
transnational feminist politics, and particular expertise on gender and Islam in Bangladesh. Her research and publications
concern globalization and human rights, non-state dispute resolution systems, and the cultural politics of Islam. She earned
her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has been a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Gender,
Sexuality and HIV/AIDS, School of Public Health , BRAC University; Dhaka Senior Research Associate at the Alice Paul Center
for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania; and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy
Dialogue, Dhaka. Siddiqi has worked for leading human rights organizations in Bangladesh including Ain o Salish Kendra, and has
been a consultant for UNDP, UNICEF and the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Dhaka. She is part of the Core Advisory Group of the South
Asian Network of Gender Activists and Trainers (SANGAT) and a member of the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim
Societies (CSBR).

SAI Pod-Coursesfrom the archives of the After-School Professional Development Workshops

"A Short History of Pakistan" was recorded in January-February 2011. It features five lectures by Visiting Professor S. Akbar Zaidi. Each lecture is about two hours long, and includes some discussion with the teacher-participants. Some of the materials distributed during the course are appended to the respective lectures, where available. (Additional materials may be posted at a later date, due to pending permissions).

Dr. S. Akbar Zaidi is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, with a joint appointment at the School of International and Public Affairs, and the Graduate School of Arts & Science Department of Middle East, South Asia, and African Studies through May 2012. Zaidi holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He taught at Karachi University for thirteen years, and was a visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University in 2004-05. He is one of Pakistan's best known and most prolific political economists. Apart from his interest in political economy, he has research interests in development, the social sciences, and history. His most recent of twelve books is Political Economy and Development in Pakistan, published in 2010. His other books include The New Development Paradigm: Papers on Institutions, NGOs, Gender and Local Government (1999), and Issues in Pakistan's Economy (2005).

A weblinks directory to South Asian history, cultures and literatures from Frances Pritchett's website on South Asia, compiled by Professor Frances Pritchett, Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. It features links to general resources; timelines; maps of South Asia: historical, political, topographic, demographic; art and architecture; Islam in general and Islam in South Asia; South Asian literature; Hindi and Urdu language and literature; calligraphy, and the life of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp

Portal Site for the National Resource Center for Language, Area, and International and Area Studies portal site: 125 National Resource Centers (NRCs) throughout the United States have been established at colleges and universities with funding from the U.S. Department of Education to establish, strengthen, and operate language and area or international studies centers that will be national resources for teaching any modern foreign language. Find an NRC near you, upcoming K-12 teacher training workshops, and resources for the classroom.http://www.nrcweb.org

Portal Site for Outreach world: a comprehensive resource for teaching international and area studies and foreign languages in the precollegiate classroom (all world regions including South Asia, Africa, Middle East, East Asia, etc).http://www.outreachworld.org/index.asp